Copyright protection of cultural heritage multimedia data through digital watermarking techniques

Digital watermarking has been revealed to be an efficient technique to cope with the problem of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection of multimedia data. This technology embeds into the data an unperceivable digital code, namely the watermark, carrying information about the copyright status of the work to be protected. In this paper, the practical feasibility of IPR protection of multimedia data through digital watermarking is investigated. As it is shown, the effectiveness of watermarking as an IPR protection tool turns out to be heavily affected by the detection strategy, which has to be carefully matched to the application at hand. Finally the practical case of the Tuscany&Gifu Art Virtual Gallery has been considered in detail, to further explain in which manner a watermarking technique can be actually used.